Digital Marketing: Are we getting it right?

Digital marketing and demand generation strategies have evolved over time and brought about a paradigm shift in how the world is looking at Digital. With the eruption of new and differentiated marketing channels, constant and continuous change in customer behavior and competition that forces one to rethink and keep innovating new marketing strategies, it takes more than just a linear approach to stay ahead of the race.

While innovation and thinking out of the box plays a key role in the success of your marketing initiatives it is also critical to keep your basics right. A small unnoticed factor that we consider to be of least importance can lead to huge failures and prove costly. Be it deciding the right target audience for your campaigns, deciding on the right digital channel, crafting the best fit messaging or even deciding on the right tools and platforms for your marketing outreach, there is a lot of unnoticed things that can go wrong. Besides, there is every chance that it creates a negative brand.

While experts talk about different marketing strategies and the impact it brings across different marketing channels, I think it is equally or even more important to be extremely cautious about simple errors that could prove costly.

Making every penny count

Is your target audience the best fit for the message you wanted to deliver?

The funny side of marketing is that most often you do messaging and marketing promotions for an audience base that you don’t know. While all efforts go in to build an expectational strategy, stunning creatives and the fanciest of language. However, the least effort is taken to understand if your target audience is the one who deserves this nice piece of information that you are force pushing to them.

Based on a market research report only 61% of marketers feel that their marketing efforts are engaging with the right audience. Another eye-opening statement from a study indicates that impressions reaching the wrong audience or none were $112 billion a year in America and $220 billion worldwide, or just over half of their total spending.

Lesson learned – Before you start your digital campaigns ensure you have identified the right audience and be specific about the target personas, and try to forecast the impact each individual could create for your campaign. The right audience means spending your dollars in the right place.

Tailor-made messaging for your marketing strategies

Are you speaking the language that your target audience is looking for?

In an era where there is no route to escape from digital bombing, your messaging, however strong it is gets labelled as SPAM and finds it place in the junk folders of users systems. The only way out of this situation is to excite the ones who consume your content. Make them feel that the content was just created for them and you had touched his heart and mind at the same time.

Personalized marketing is beyond customizing the first name or company names in your emails. It is actually following the behavioral pattern of your prospects and tailoring your message in a more personalized manner. A perfect example of this Netflix updating you about new additions based on your choice of video content or reminding you to complete viewing an unfinished video. Another good example is how Amazon understands your buying pattern and pushes you offers that you can’t resist.

A Gartner report says that organizations that focus their personalized messaging around helping consumers can expect 16% more impact on commercial outcomes than those that don’t.

Referred below is a report that indicates how personalized marketing help marketers in impacting deals, sales cycles and more.

Lesson learned – Every dollar spend without understanding the behavioral pattern of your prospect or without personalizing your strategy to the prospect needs is equal to searching for success in thin air.

Compromising on responsive content

Is your content providing the best in class experience?

With 52% of the online content is now consumed on mobile devices, there is no choice for marketers, but to ensure that your content is responsive and adaptable to any device. Today on an average a millennial consumes content across three mobile devices. On an average a customer spends more than a quarter of the time per day online and when provided a bad experience such as slow page loads, poor design or inaccurate content the chances of them coming back to you are zero. Your channels must be responsive and have a mobile-first approach as your valuable prospects have less patience for poor experiences.

Lesson learned -With responsive design, your content is adaptable across different screen resolutions and on different devices. This enhanced user experience can increase brand recall and loyalty to your brand. Remember 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.

Video-based marketing is no longer an option but a necessity

YouTube is the second largest search engine. Are you part of it?

Over the last few years, video-based marketing has increased exponentially. Video marketing is now dominating the digital ocean and will continue not only to be an important but a dominating asset in the marketing landscape.

Consumers today have too many choices to make and they simply don’t need to be sold. There is a whole ocean of content that is available at their fingertips. The decision-making time had drastically come down and customers don’t need a hard sell. Marketers today are looking for a value-based approach that gives an up-close view of their product or services.

Where traditional methods like emails and static content fail to get the message across the prospect, video content gets an upper hand in delivering the message more interestingly and engagingly. Video marketing provides an opportunity for storytelling and easily capturing audience attention and interest.

Viewers retain 95% of the message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading in a text format.

Lesson learned: Videos need to be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Video marketing has proven to be more attention-demanding than any other medium of content propagation and hence has a higher rate of prospect conversion thereby resulting in more customer acquisitions.

Call to Action (CTA) is a must for people to react

If you expect your prospect to do something, you need to ask them to do it.

As an inbound marketer, all the hard work that you have put in building great marketing strategies is only complete when you convert your audience into meaningful prospects. Here comes the landing page with a defined action that helps solve this problem of meaningful conversions. A landing page is a place where your audience gets directed through one of your marketing channels. The landing page further helps in capturing details of your future potential customers. Call to action continues to be the heart of the landing page for any inbound marketer’s lead generation efforts. A marketing research report states 44% of clicks from B2B companies get directed to standard business pages on the website and not to a specific landing page with a defined call to action. Another important feature of the landing page is that you can personalize the webpage content as per your buyer persona.

Lesson learned: It is important that all our lead generation initiatives and directed to a landing page. This enables your audience to take the desired action that will help increase your chance of converting them to a customer. Remember that landing pages are the weapon to move the needle up in terms of lead generation.

While these a few factors if considered can help in boosting your marketing performance and increase your marketing return on investment (ROI). The most important lever that can help scale up your marketing strategies is to understand the mistakes made, its impact on marketing performance and learn from it. The learning further translates in to do’s and don’ts of your marketing plan and help to build your best practices. In the upcoming posts, I will try talking about the above pointers at length.

Keep in mind – Understand your audience behavior before tagging them as your best-fit prospect reduces marketing cost and increases ROI

References and credits:

Authored by Vinod Krishnan, Associate Marketing Director – Microland Limited